The ‘Borderlands’ Disaster

Eli Roth has made a career out of interrogating innocence and douchbaggery in expolitical horror films. The only way into the absolute slop that is his biggest budget film, broadest “appeal” film to date, the video-game adaptation Borderlands, is an auteurist one. But even that is hardly fruitful. In fact, it gives us all the more reason to condemn the soulless product he’s taken on seemingly just for a check. We can only hope a “one for me” follows this “one for them”, as in the end it’s a “one for nobody.”

One of Roth’s biggest fixations is “the thrill kill”, a crucial facet of the morbid fascination that powers slashers to their raw power. Whereas we’re “safe” in the knowledge the jerks who Jason Vorhees slaughters aren’t “real”, there’s something too real about the soft abrasion of a Roth heel. He’ll engineer a few selfish or insensitive characters and drop them in a meat grinder, holding a mirror up to both our own imperfections and judgmental attitudes. While the characters in Borderlands are largely A-holes, it’s of the done-to-death antihero-arcing-towards-begrudging-redemption variety, and the film is a bloodless, PG-13 apolitical tentpole with unwatchable action choreography. No one could ever confuse Roth for a technician.

There’s nothing to glean about violence nor even the more direct themes of corporate greed, friendship, nor poop and pee. A video game adaptation was ripe for a Roth rebuke of The Last of Us-style pacifist moral posturing, but its actual weightlessness speaks to nothing. With no gorey tonal twist in sight, it’s the only time Roth has ever been truly edgeless, to an unrecognizable degree. While he always deals in cliche, it’s always been towards a sly subversion, never this content-mill emptiness.

The most blatant problem with Borderlands is that it’s a blatant, dulled rip off of Guardians of the Galaxy, a very destructive movie that already dulled the gusto and charm of swashbuckling post-Star Wars space fantasy with focus grouped normie-lization. It’s a copy of a copy, and the returns have diminished to naught. In a film of pure aesthetics, which, on top of borrowing a pretty bad look from its source material, is something that has never been a strength of Eli Roth’s, Ariana Greenblatt’s cute lollipop bombardier act is the slightest of saving graces, and Florian Munteanu’s bruising Psycho’s grunts are at least more amusing than anything outside of the soundtrack in GotG. Kevin Hart’s definitely been worse too, here stripped of the need to be spaz by Jack Black’s grating “R2D2 who never shuts up.”

Outside of that, it’s the same ugly neon-over-wasteland pallet we see in every post apocalyptic video game PS3 and onward with a checked-out Cate Blanchett clearly uninterested in an uninteresting film, Jamie Lee Curtis trying to will a performance into being with pure twitchiness, and a dead air quipfest that should spell the hopeful death knell for the Joss Whedon sarcasm school of comedy. The only moment that stirred me was in the climax: baddy Atlas’ hand moving behind a pillar of CGI exposing a shocking uncanny cheapness. The original problem with tentpole, “B-movie, A-picture budget” films was competence fetishism. Unintentionally, even fleetingly, Borderlands reminds us of what terrible art is supposed to look like.